In the weekend’s Wall Street Journal, I consider the history of idol-smashing and vandalism against the controversy of Confederate memorials and New York’s “Commission on Monuments.”
. . . . The problem with monuments is not going away anytime soon—and the trouble long predates the issue of Confederate memorials and the deadly protests of August 2017 that surrounded one of them in Charlottesville, Virginia. A contempt for false idols is written deep into human nature.